Read Chapter 30: Last Words

The current shoved Jack sideways the moment he let go of the rail, dragging him along the hull like a leaf in a storm. He caught the next handhold—a corroded ladder rung—and pulled himself flat against the metal, cheek pressed to the cold, barnacle-crusted skin of the station.

Three meters from the structural ring. That was all he needed. Three meters and a key that might save them all—or lock him in a tomb with a god.

His brother’s voice came through the helmet comm, soft at first, like it was coming from underwater.

“Jack.”

He froze. His gloved hand tightened on the rung.

“Don’t.”

The voice was younger than he remembered. Clearer. It was the voice from the last voicemail Danny had ever left him, the one Jack had listened to a hundred times in the dark of his apartment, drunk and hating himself.

*Hey, Jack. It’s me. Look, I know things are weird between us, but I wanted to say—*

“Don’t listen to her.” Danny’s voice was warm now, almost pleading. “She lied to you. Voss lied. She’s been lying since the beginning.”

Jack pulled himself forward, one rung at a time. The valve access was visible now, a dark circular mouth in the hull, four bolt holes gaping empty where he’d already pulled them. The key was in his hand, still warm from the chamber.

“Jack.” The voice grew sharper. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to keep running.”

“You’re not Danny,” Jack said. His own voice came back to him hollow and thin through the helmet.

“I’m not *not* Danny.” A pause. The current moaned past him. “I remember everything he remembered. I remember the night he died.”

Jack’s hand slipped. He caught himself on a weld seam, heart hammering.

“You remember nothing. You’re a parasite wearing a dead man’s face.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” The voice softened, almost sad. “Is that how you sleep at night, knowing what you did?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You left him.”

The words hit harder than the current. Jack pressed his forehead against the hull, eyes squeezed shut behind the visor.

“He called you. Three times. The night the rig collapsed, he called you, and you let it ring. You were sitting in your apartment, watching the rain through the window, and you let it ring.”

“That’s not true.”

“You were angry at him. Because of what he said at the funeral. Because he told you the truth about Mom and you couldn’t take it, so you punished him with silence. And when he needed you most, when the water came up around his legs and the whole platform was screaming—

“Shut up.”

“—you weren’t there. You were never there, Jack. You were always a hundred miles away, feeling sorry for yourself. And Danny paid for it. Danny paid for your pride with his life.”

Jack’s fingers trembled on the valve access ring. The mark on his hand flared hot, pulsing in time with something deep in the water beneath him.

“You know what the worst part is?” the voice said, softer now. “He didn’t blame you. Even at the end, he didn’t blame you. He was calling to say he was proud of you. That he understood why you couldn’t pick up. That he loved you anyway.”

“Stop.”

“He loved you, and you let him die alone.”

Jack opened his eyes. The valve was right in front of him, the recessed keyhole waiting. The flood core was on the other side, thirty centimeters of steel separating him from the thing that had been whispering in his ear since the moment he’d touched that black shard.

He raised the key.

“You don’t have to do this,” Danny’s voice said again. “You can come inside. We can be together. He’s still in here, Jack—I can feel him. He wants to see you again. He wants to tell you it’s okay.”

Jack’s hand hovered over the keyhole. The current pulled at his legs, demanding he decide.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

And he jammed the key into the lock.

The voice reeled back—not in pain, but in surprise. The comm crackled, filled with static, and for half a second Jack heard something else underneath it, something vast and ancient and furious.

Then Danny’s voice came back, colder now. Harsher.

“You think you understand. You think you know what you’re doing. But you don’t know the truth about your brother, Jack. You don’t know what he was really doing down there. You don’t know what he was trying to contain.”

Jack twisted the key. Something clicked deep in the mechanism, and the hull groaned around him.

“What are you talking about?”

“The station was never scientific,” the entity said, and for the first time, the voice wasn’t Danny’s. It was something else layered underneath—a choir of drowned voices speaking in perfect unison. “Voss didn’t bring you here to study a discovery. She brought you here because you were the only one who could reach this core without being consumed. Because you’d been exposed before.”

Jack’s hand froze on the key. The valve hadn’t opened yet—there was a second security ring, one Voss hadn’t mentioned.

“Exposed to what?”

“To me.” The voice rippled through the comm, distorted and vast. “You touched me years ago, Jack. In the wreckage of the *Meridian* platform. You pulled your brother’s body from the flood chamber, and you touched the sample that killed him. And you survived.”

The current seemed to still around him. The water went silent.

“That’s why you’re here,” the entity said. “That’s why she chose you. Not because you’re strong—but because you’re already infected. You’ve been carrying me inside you since the night your brother died. And if you open that valve, you’re not flooding my core.”

Jack stared at the lock in his hand.

“You’re flooding yourself.”